Mademoiselle Fifi eBook

his first novel “Une Vie”, twenty-five
thousand copies of which were sold in less than a year.
Glory and Fortune smiled on him. In his novels,
he concentrated all his observations scattered in
his short stories. His second novel “Bel
Ami”, which came out in 1885, had thirty-seven
editions in four months. His editor, Havard,
commissioned him to write new masterpieces and, without
the slightest effort, his pen produced new masterpieces
of style, description, conception and penetration[*].
With a natural aversion for Society, he loved retirement,
solitude and meditation. He traveled extensively
in Algeria, Italy, England, Britany, Sicily, Auvergne,
and from each voyage he brought back a new volume.
He cruised on his private yacht “Bel Ami”,
named after one of his earlier masterpieces.
This feverish life did not prevent him from making
friends among the literary celebrities of his day:
Dumas fils had a paternal affection for him; at Aix-les-Bains
he met Taine and fell under the spell of the philosopher-historian.
Flaubert continued to act as his literary Godfather.
His friendship with the Goucourts was of short duration;
his frank and practical nature reacted against the
ambiance of gossip, scandal, duplicity and invidious
criticism that the two brothers had created around
them in the guise of an Eighteenth Century style salon.
He hated the human comedy, the social farce.

In his latter years he developed an exaggerated love
for solitude, a predilection for self-preservation
and still worse, a constant fear of death and mania
of persecution, which ran like a black thread through
all his writings and brought on gradually the final
tragic catastrophe.—­He became insane in
1891 and died in 1893 without having recovered his
mind.

Life, movement, penetrating[*] observation, and hypersensitiveness,
both artistic and physical, are the dominant traits
of this literary phenomenon. His rise to fame
was as vertiginous as his fall and decay. As
a novelist he may have his equals and superiors, but
as a short story-writer, with the exception of Charles
Nodier and Alphonse Daudet, he had none.—­

The Happy Hour Library

[*][Note from Brett: The original uses “penertation”
and “penertating” but I could not find
this word anywhere so assumed it was a typographical
error.]

Mademoiselle Fifi

The Prussian Commander, Major Graf von Farlsberg,
was finishing the reading of his mail, comfortably
seated in a large tapestry armchair, with his booted
feet resting on the elegant marble of the mantelpiece
on which, for the last three months that he had been
occupying the Chateau d’Uville, his spurs had
traced two deep grooves, growing deeper every day.

A cup of coffee was steaming on an inlaid guerdon,
stained with liqueur, burned by cigars, notched by
the penknife of the conquering officer who, while
sharpening his pencil, would stop at times and trace
on the marble monograms or designs according to the
fancy of his indolent dream.